Teach and learn with a live satellite catalog
Lessons, datasets, and research methods built on OrbitalWiki's real, source-backed catalog. Pick a path below, search the lessons, or start with a student project.
Start with the learner
Choose the closest teaching context. You can refine the lesson list afterwards.
Secondary school
Ages 11–18. Short, self-contained activities using real satellite records.
Undergraduate aerospace
Orbit regimes, catalogs, and the identifiers that tie datasets together.
Data science
Joining, cleaning, and reasoning about a real, imperfect public catalog.
Computer science
Working with a public REST API, keys, and structured provenance data.
Amateur radio
Finding spacecraft, receiving responsibly, and planning passes from current orbital elements.
Research methods
Provenance, conflicting sources, and citing an evolving dataset honestly.
Choose a lesson
Filter by learner group, then narrow by topic, level, or time. Every card opens the full lesson.
4 lessons
- Introductory programming, data engineering, or A-level computing · 55 min
When a Catalog Number Outgrows Its Format
The Two-Line Element format reserves exactly five characters for the catalog number. The catalog passed 99,999. This lesson makes that abstract lesson about fixed-width fields concrete, with an endpoint that really does return an error.
data-formatstleommidentifiersapilegacy-systemserror-handling - Introductory programming and web APIs · 50 min
Paginate and Back Off Politely
Any dataset worth having is bigger than one response. Learn to walk a paginated endpoint, respect the limits the server tells you about, and write a retry loop that recovers instead of making the outage worse.
apipaginationrate-limitinghttpbackoffethics - Introductory data science and research methods · 60 min
Match Records Across Two Catalogs
Joining by name looks easy and fails quietly. Joining by identifier works until you ask who issued the identifier and what they meant by it. Students build a match table with an explicit confidence for every row.
entity-resolutionjoinsidentifiersprovenancedata-quality - Introductory programming or web APIs · 45 min
Make a Source-Aware API Request
Use the documented API to retrieve one record, then preserve the request, response date, and source claims instead of treating JSON as self-explanatory truth.
apijsonhttpprovenance
Educator resources
Notebooks
Jupyter notebooks that run against the live OrbitalWiki API. Every request in them is real and was executed before publication. Download one, open it in Jupyter, run it top to bottom.
All notebooksDataset downloads
Use versioned dataset releases for reproducible coursework.
Browse datasetsCitation guide
Use the site guide to cite records and dataset releases accurately.
Open citation guideRequest a lesson language
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Request a languageInstructor packs
The Satellite Science Unit Pack collects all 17 lessons into one printable document, with every worksheet, answer key and figure included, under a licence that covers a single classroom or family. Every lesson stays free to read and download on its own.
Student project ideas
Identifier detective
Pick ten satellites, record both identifiers from their record pages, and explain what each identifier does and does not tell you. Builds directly on the identifiers lesson.
Orbit-regime census
Use the catalog's orbit-class data to count how many active objects sit in LEO, MEO, GEO and HEO, and write up what the distribution implies about how space is used today.
Provenance audit
Find a satellite whose record shows conflicting or unverified fields, then trace each claim to its source and confidence. A concrete introduction to data provenance.